welcome to our home mini-album

This mini-album was a gift to my mother-in-law for Mother's Day. You can see by the cover that it has been handled and viewed, and loved I hope. Which is just the way you want a gift to be.

I built the house out of chipboard pieces and covered the square with patterned paper. The sun is an American Crafts chipboard Christmas star that I added the negative round piece from something else to make it look more like a sun. For the flower leaves, I used a Fiskars heart punch and cut it in half.

Each of the pages is made from cereal, breakfast bar and mac-n-cheese boxes we saved from the recycle bin and are sized to 8x4. Those extra two inches {I used 6x4 photos} left room for the patterned paper and a strip of ribbon I cut to hide where the paper and photo meet.

No journaling. I just let the beauty of the cultivated and wild flowers speak for themselves. I did try to choose papers that enhanced the blooms, not competed with them, though.

You can see that my mother-in-law is a master gardener.

The park bench is one of my very first photographs with my {then} new Canon 40D on New Year's Day 2008. It remains one of my favorite photographs, even now tens of thousands of photos later.

I wanted to share this mini-album with you to show that you probably have loads of photographs on your hard drive that you can print and assemble into beautifully handcrafted gifts for your loved ones. It's never too early to start thinking about gift ideas so that you have a head start in getting the types of photos you need to complete your project.